Sunday, May 18, 2008

Terra Incognita 35 The BBC, Myanmar and cults

Terra Incognita Issue 35“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. FrantzmanJerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

May 18th, 2008

1) Jeremy Bowen: BBC’s Hizbullah Spokesman: The recent crises revealed one interesting thing: the BBC is actually the unpaid spokesman for Hizbullah. To be fair it is isn’t the official spokesman, it merely acts like one by deleting video that is ‘offensive’ to Hizbullah and having Hizbullah minders around it and framing the conflict so that Hizbullah is ‘resisting’ and is ‘the opposition’. One wonders, if the BNP did to London what Hizbullah did to Beirut would the BBC describe it merely as ‘the opposition’?

2) To help them we must kill them: a lesson from the UN’s condemnation of Burma: The hysteria with which the world has confronted Myanmar (Burma) during the recent natural disaster is ironic considering the same world contributed to the fact that Burma is so backward through the endless boycotts and sanctions placed on the country. Now we hear that in order to save the people of Burma we must invade the country, enacting a little known U.N provision that allows countries to be taken over if they shirk on their responsibility to their citizens. But should the ‘international community’ and the aid mafia be allowed to transform Burma into yet another colony along the line of the ‘successes’ in Haiti, Kosovo and East Timor.

3) Is Islam a cult? : The recent media hype about a marginal cult in Texas whose main claim to infamy is that they marry girls at a young age and dress in ‘pioneer’ style clothing sheds light on something else. Is Islam so different than the cult being exposed in Texas? Is the downward obedient look of the cult women, the polygamy, the child marriage and the modest old fashioned clothing so different than the state of affairs in Saudi Arabia? Yes the same news organizations fawn every year over the exoticism of the Hajj and Ramadan. Perhaps Islam deserves to be treated they way these Texas cult members have been treated: as a social pariah, or we should all examine the way we are condemning these ‘cults’.

On May 4th, 2008 when Walid Jumblat began discussing plans with the government to suspend Hizbullah’s communication’s network in Lebanon he didn’t count on one thing: the BBC cannot be suspended by the Lebanese government. The Lebanese government decision to attempt to close down Hizbullah’s communication network and fire a Hizbullah operative employed as security chief at Beirut’s international airport angered Hizbullah and it flexed its muscles, murdering 37 Sunnis and taking over the Sunni neighborhoods of Beirut. When Sunnis tried to bury their dead the funeral processions were shot at. Tens of thousands of Sunnis were cleansed from their communities. The BBC was there throughout it all. When Hizbullah burned down the TV station of Saad Hariri (Lebanese parliamentary leader and son of the Rafik Hariri, the slain Sunni Lebanese leader whose murder forced Syria to pull out of Lebanon) the BBC was there to rejoice. A white British BBC commentator named Crispon Thorold did not mention that Hizbullah had assaulted the media and freedom of speech by destroying a TV station. Instead the BBC said the ‘opposition’ in its campaign of ‘civil disobedience’ had attacked “a real symbolic target…many people and those in Hizbullah resent Saad Hariri and believe he is one of the problems in the state.” This is the BBC’s opinion, not the opinion of ‘many people.’ It is the opinion of the Hizbullah operatives who work for the BBC and who work as their security and who guide them around.

The BBC is primarily the mouthpiece of Hizbullah to the world. It is the sanitizer for Hizbullah’s actions It gives its history of the fighting “The Shia group had taken the streets after the government tried to shut down their telecoms network, causing four days of street fighting. Jeremy Bowen reports from Lebanon.” When BBC cameraman Jeremy Bowen was shot at by Hizbullah during a tour of the Chouf mountains he refused to identify who was shooting at him. He did note that he had a ‘security detail’, no doubt other Hizbullah men. When a Shia Hizbullah shopowner murdered two Sunnis walking in a funeral procession the BBC noted that “Protesters burned down a shop belonging to the alleged shooter, after at least two mourners were killed.” Note the use of the word ‘alleged’.Jeremy Bowen is the center of this charade. But he is not the first. The BBC’s use of Hizbullah minders and bodyguards goes back several years or more when it covered the Second Lebanon War between Israel and Hizbullah. During that war the BBC passed off fake footage of destroyed houses, faked footage of screaming women and dead children in which the same children and women were moved from location to location in order to inflate the death tolls. But even worse the BBC made sure to position its cameras in such a manner so as to obscure the locations they were shooting from when Hizbullah was launching rockets as civilians inside Israel from just meters away. Thus the BBC actually became part of the Hizbullah war and propaganda machine.

Jeremy Bowen is the center. Note how Hizbullah’s actions are described as ‘civil disobedience’ by the high brow British commentator speaking the Queen’s English. Civil disobedience? 81 people have been murdered by Hizbullah so far in Lebanon. Half of Beirut was taken over. Sunnis and Druze were cleansed from towns and neighborhoods. Indiscriminate shooting caused casualties of civilians. Funeral processions were shot at. Civil disobedience? If it was England would it be called ‘civil disobedience’? Hizbullah has shut down the highways leading from Beirut to the airport. Civil disobedience? If 81 BBC cameramen were shot dead would it be ‘civil disobedience’? If it was Mr. Bowen’s family that was shot down would it be ‘civil disobedience’? If it was London’s Heathrow airport and the BBC couldn’t drive their SUVs up to the entrance to unload their cameras would it be ‘civil disobedience’? If it were a BBC TV station that had been burned rather than Future TV in Lebanon would it be smirked at the way Mr. Thorold made jokes when he examined the destroyed Lebanese station.

The BBC is the greatest mouthpiece of terrorists worldwide. For the BBC a murder becomes ‘disobedience’ and ethnic-cleansing becomes ‘opposition’ and war become ‘fighting’ and murderers become ‘activists’. One can only hope that England will suffer the likes of Hizbullah sooner rather than later so the world can watch as the arrogant commentators at BBC try to describe what it is like when it is British people dying for no reason, being gunned down by a terrorist-mafia like Hizbullah. When it is the Thorold’s and the Bowens dying, then perhaps the BBC will reconsider its devil’s handshake with terror.

Riz Khan, a former commentator for CNN and the BBC and now the anchor for Al-Jazeera English edition noted that “Fox News has led the way in a new trend toward editorializing the television news, he complains. "Fox News started [the trend] by positioning itself as a right-wing service. I was shocked when this started happening. I was taught, in my early years in the BBC almost 20 years ago, that I do not have an opinion. But people love scraps, they love to see people fighting. In America, they're turning to opinion over news.” Remember, the BBC doesn’t have an opinion. On April 9th, 2008 in a story titled ‘ ‘Ambush’ that left SAS trooper dead’ the BBC’s Iraq reporter Paul Wood concluded that “The SAS killed two ‘bombmakers’. They may have created many more.” No opinion? No editorializing. From the perspective of the BBC and Al-Jazeera who see themselves as centrist and who work for Hizbullah this is indeed not an editorial. This is just the facts. Putting things in quotes such as ‘bombmaker’ and ‘ambush’ to cast aspersions on the truth behind how the SAS soldier was killed and who the SAS targeted in the battle is certainly not an editorial. The BBC is not only an editorializing behemoth, where every story is editorialized and every report is full of tears and extreme claims but the BBC is also the actual mouthpiece of murder and terror, an organization devoted to covering up the crimes and excusing the crimes of terrorists and genocidaires. It is an organization whose sole existence is to exploit suffering, create myths, confuse viewers and convince the unconvinced. Its is not a Broadcasting corporation but a propaganda tool. It should be branded a party to terrorism and its funding should be shut off by the government for the funding of the BBC leads directly to the funding of Hizbullah through the Hizbullah affiliated ‘security’ personnel the BBC hires in Lebanon. Jeremy Bowen admitted live on the air that the BBC actually crafts its footage to please Hizbullah. Bowen admits at one point during an online film entitled “Hizbullah withdraws from Beirut”, after noting that the ‘real enemy’ of Lebanon is Israel that “we filmed a group of gunmen pulling a man out of a building. When they saw what we were doing they turned on us and the situation was only diffused when we erased the tapes.” Who were these ‘gunmen’ Mr. Bowen? Mr. Bowen obscures the fact that they were Hizbullah gunmen. When the BBC realized they had inadvertently filmed Hizbullah they erased the tapes. It is the reason that in all the BBC footage of the recent fighting in Beirut that has gone on from May 8th-12th, not one film shows Hizbullah operatives or their deeds and when the aftermath of the Hizbullah murder and destruction spree is shown the group is called the ‘opposition’. This is the BBC. This is the news. This is the British government. This is Hizbullah. How many people have died today in Lebanon because of the BBC broadcasts? How many murdered civilians have they covered up? How many Israeli civilians died because the BBC aided Hizbullah in the Lebanon war, reporting from Israel whenever Hizbullah scored direct hits so that they could find out their aim was correct and at the same time obscuring the Hizbullah launchers in Lebanon. How many? How many are dead everyday in the world because of the actions of the BBC? How many are dead because of Mr. Bowen’s reports, his fabrications, his erasing of tapes to please thugs, his disgusting sniveling attitude. It may be no surprise that Mr. Bowen was given the task by the BBC of doing a video documentary of Israel’s history. That history was described by him as ‘often violent’ and was broken down into ten segments: the 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982 wars, the Egypt-Israel and Oslo peace agreements, the two intifadas, the withdrawal from Gaza and the Second Lebanon war. Mr. Bowen found only violence in Israel’s past. In Lebanon he finds only ‘civil disobedience’ and an ‘opposition’.

To help them we must kill them: a lesson from the UN’s condemnation of BurmaSeth J. FrantzmanMay 14th, 2008

A recent video and lecture held at the Willy Brandt Center in Jerusalem (the oddly named: ‘German center where Israelis and Palestinians can meet and discuss coexistence’ which includes the necessary messages about ‘indigenous’ people and ‘rights of minorities’ and paintings by ‘children’ showing Palestinians in prison) documented the ineffectual response of the UN and Kfor to the destruction of Serbian property and monasteries in 2004. But what it highlighted most was the lack of responsibility and accountability international organizations have. It can be summed up thus: If an international organization rapes your daughter or murders your son, who do you turn to? In short international law does not apply to international organizations. Take the issues of refugees. We are told that under international law refugees have either a right of return or right to compensation. In Kosovo there was neither for the 250,000 Serbs cleansed from the province by the UN and Nato. Take the protection of cultural and archeological sites. In Kosovo the UN has watched as 14 century frescoes and ancient Christian monasteries, ones not ever destroyed during a 400 year Ottoman occupation, were destroyed between 1999 and 2008. Sex trafficking and drug trafficking: the UN has and Nato have not been held accountable for the numerous times their own workers have engaged in the mass rape of teenage girls trafficked from Moldova and elsewhere to serve the sexual needs of the KFOR troops. In short NATO and the UN have not observed international law in terms of the responsibilities of an occupying force. The same UN that passes dozens of resolutions a year against the Israeli occupation and has special investigators regarding Israeli rule in the West Bank has not done due diligence in terms of its own accountability in ethnic-cleansing, the creation of refugees, crime, destruction of cultural monuments and the rape of 12 year old girls. Who has been responsible for the outrages in Kosovo and this complete lack of accountability? Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France. In Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human rights to sell war, Jean Bricmont gives a short history of the Kouchner consensus regarding the need to use ‘human rights’ as an excuse to invade, slaughter, colonize and destroy people. All in the name of saving them. Kouchner is an old activist at this, the founder of Doctors without Borders, has been up to this game for a while. The idea is that nations should intervene to prevent disaster and genocide. Oddly enough such interventions don’t seem to happen when actual genocides are taking place, such as in Rwanda and Sudan. Instead they seem to happen when almost nothing is taking place: such as in Serbia and Haiti. In East Timor the intervention was not ill-timed, but the never-ending nature of it is. In Congo the intervention was during a time of extreme bloodshed, but it seems to have actually encouraged more bloodshed since UN troops have been involved in the arms trade in the country since they have arrived. The latest cause celebre of Kouchner and many other Europeans and westerners is the need to intervene in Burma. Why Burma? Why not Sudan? International intervention is, according to this theorists, important but it can only be used against certain countries. The countries cannot be ‘European’ and they cannot be Muslim. Ideally they should be countries that are alone, in the sense that they are culturally alone. If they are unique, such as Israel, all the better, because they don’t have large blocs of friends at the UN to give them support. Andrew Kirkwood of ‘Save the Children’ has been flying around the Irrawady Delta arguing for an invasion of Burma to ‘save the children’(why only the children? Apparently so they can be brought up by Europeans who can teach them about human rights). He has been using his European funded helicopter to fly over the dying Burmese while in the Burma the government has only five helicopters. (this thanks to an international UN sponsored embargo of Burma that has prevented it from buying helicopters lest they be used by the Burmese military). Thus the typical wealthy European humanitarian aid ‘specialist’ is using a helicopter to ‘survey the damage’ rather than helping the dying. Thus white Europeans actually have more helicopters in Burma than the Burmese government, but they won’t be putting those helicopters where their mouths are, just as they won’t using their clean SUVs to help any of the Burmese dead and dying. Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief is clambering for an invasion: “outside donors should find a way to deliver it [aid] anyway [without first consulting the Burmese government.” In truth what has happened in Burma is a study in how international organizations function. A terrible disaster strikes. The UN shows up with its colonization force: helicopters, planes and SUVs demanding to take over the disaster area and ‘coordinate’ relief using ‘humanitarian experts’. The Burmese government requested that the aid be put in the hands of the government which would distribute it. When the UN found out that the natives would not let them take over part of Burma the UN pulled out the food shipments. Now the international community accuses Burma ‘restricting’ foreign aid and ‘blocking’ foreign aid. But what has Burma blocked? It has blocked white Europeans form tramping around its country and doing to Burma what the UN has done to Serbia, Haiti and East Timor and the Congo. It has stopped tens of thousands of German and Scandinavian foreign aid workers arriving in SUVs, living in special ‘European Aid worker only’ hotels and setting up sex-slave brothels for themselves to satisfy their desires. Doctors without Borders has been expelled by the Burmese government and only a few dozen ‘professional aid workers’ have been given visas. Perhaps the Burmese government objects to the idea that a person should live his or her whole life working in ‘international aid’. Perhaps the Burmese, most of whome have jobs, cannot understand how a European can live his whole life going from one country to another telling foreigners how to live, ordering foreigners to carry aid packages, driving an SUV, flying a special UN plane and living in special compounds and hotels. Perhaps the Burmese, recalling colonialism, do not want legions of Europeans tramping around their country not obeying Burmese law. So Europeans and westerners have decided that there is another way to deal with a country that won’t let their aid mafia take over the country. In the Herald Tribune on May 14th, Ivo Daalder and Pail Stares, the former of the Brookings institute and the latter of the Council on Foreign Relations have argued that the UN charter expresses a clause that forces governments to have a ‘responsibility to protect’. Thus a government that does not help its own people, to the standards the Europeans desire, must be crushed beneath the boot of the international community. They argues that the “United Nations invoke this collective responsibility to protect the people of Burma…[but] not to resort to the immediate use of force...to use international pressure [i.e sanctions?]…[and take] urgent action.” Reading through the lines one understands what Paul and Ido recommend: Burma must be destroyed so that it can be saved. Embargo. Sanctions. Invasion. International intervention. Colonization. Burma is a threat to its own people. It must therefore be destroyed. Its people must be killed so that they can be saved from the ‘junta’. Lets pause for one second here. Imagine if the ‘international community’ had decided that the U.S was derelict in its duty after Katrina and had followed the course that Javier and Paul recommend for Burma: forcible aid delivery. It would have been funny to watch UN workers trying to force their way ashore in New Orleans with their SUVs and helicopters. Watching a bunch of Europeans trying to come ashore only to be robbed and gunned down by American gangsters from New Orleans. Only to have their SUVs stolen immediately. It would have joyful to watch. Even the people of New Orleans, despite their abandonment by the local authorities and Louisiana and the Federal government for the better part of a week would not have taken kindly to arrogant Swiss and Norwegian Europeans telling them where they can get food and where they can walk. They would not have taken kindly to a UN colonization scheme-ala-Kosovo. The UN preys on weak nations where the little people dare not resist. But what of the UN and international role in what has happened in Burma? Two days before the Cyclone hit there was an article in the Tribune about American actors taking up the cause of Burma. They were protesting against the Burmese ‘junta’. One actress held up a sign that declared ‘Hitler lives’ showing the military dictators of Burma. Few of these good natures leftists had evidently read River of Lost Footsteps by Thant Myint-U, a relative of U Thant, who argues that the world should first understand Burma and learn about it before condemning it in such obnoxious terms. The international embargo in place against the ‘junta’ has actually resulted in the fact that the government cannot get aid to its own people. Thus it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Europeans boycott Burma. Europeans won’t sell Burma helicopters (but they will sell Iran equipment for nuclear weapons). Then when there is a natural disaster the same leftist Europeans say ‘we must invade Burma to save it.’ One should not, but one must, recognize the historical origin of this. During the years of European intervention which is also called ‘colonialism’ in the 19th century we see that many of the European invasions of many places, especially in Africa, were under the auspices of helping. The Congo was taken over by Belgium to stop the slave trade, especially the Arab slave trade that was then depopulating the Eastern Congo. Belgium was given trusteeship. Belgians immediately began enslaving the Africans. An irony. Today the UN is still in the Congo, once again enslaving and colonizing it. The original British intervention which became the Boer war, and where the first concentration camps were constructed, was under the guise of protecting the ‘human rights’ of British citizens living in the Boer Republics that were then free and independent states in Southern Africa. Thus the history of ‘we must kill them to save them’ is quite old. In the 1990s Nato intervened a number of times in the Yugoslavian wars of succession in order to ‘save’ people. Is Kosovo the model for Burma. The Serbian government was not ‘responsible’ in Kosovo. The UN invaded the province and took it over. After almost 10 years, while 250,000 Serbs were forced to leave and thousands were killed and some 40 monasteries and churches were destroyed, the UN left. There was, of course, no ‘UN responsibility to protect’ Where does one go after the UN has invaded your country and it refuses to protect you. What does one do when it turns out the UN troops are raping young girls and selling guns as they do in the Congo? Who does one turn to when the international community breaks its own international law and is no longer protecting the country it has taken over as a steward under the excuse of helping defend ‘human rights’? All one can do is reach for their rifle the way the American Revolutionary War leaders did. All one can do is follow the example of Sam Adams and Patrick Henry (‘give me liberty or give me death). The world should not fall for this scam that people need to be invaded and colonized in order to be saved. The world has done nothing to help in the Sudan where a real genocide cries out for justice. But here in Burma we have something that is easy to hate. But Europeans need, for once in their lives, to treat others the way they want to be treated. When riots erupted in Paris no one suggested that France should be invaded because it was derelict in its ‘responsibility to protect’ its citizens from rioting Muslims. Europeans must be stopped. Their UN must be stopped. Their EU must be stopped. Their obsession with telling the world how to live must be stopped. Their knee-jerk reaction that they know what is best must be stopped. No country deserves the UN. No people deserve the white SUVs illegally parking on their streets and the rich UN workers speaking in arrogant tones in coffee shops. No one deserves it. The only way to oppose the UN is to oppose it as a colonizer, to oppose it the way one opposes any form of tyranny. The Burmese people would be well placed to inform the UN “we do not want your SUVs, we do not want your suits and your cell phones. We want your aid. Your food aid. That is all.” In the U.S State of Maine there is a bumper sticker that says “Welcome to Mane, now go home.” Welcome to Burma. Now go back to the Brookings Institute. Now go back to Geneva. Go back or you may find yourself face down in a rice patty, like all the dead from the cyclone, the dead who cannot be rescued because Europe has embargoed Burma for so long.

Is Islam a cult?Seth J. FrantzmanMay 14th, 2008

When police raided a 'cult' in Texas they found child marriage and rape and hundreds of children were confiscated. They found that some of the teenage girls had been pregnant and that they had been forced into arranged marriages. They found that young girls had married older men. They were polygamous. When the girls appeared in an interview on Foxnews the commentators made fun over their 'hokey' dress and psychologists noted that they talked in a bland robotic manner and kept their eyes down. America was outraged. These people, it seemed, were easy to hate. There weren't very many of them, just a thousand or so. They were a 'cult'. The state had no problem putting the boot of government down the throats of these people, shipping their children off by the truckload to unknown destinations where legions of social workers could have their way with them. No doubt the members of this cult will not be seeing their little girls again. The 'robotic' housewives in their 'stupid looking' clothing will, apparently, be allowed by the government to return to their husbands, if those husbands avoid jail time.

But when no one realized while all the late night talk shows and pundits and comedians were making fun and lynching this cult was the similarities between it and a much larger cult called 'Islam'. This Texas based cult and its treatment of women is no different than the subjugation practiced by Islam. Polygamy is the same. The 'stupid clothing' is the same. The shamefaced, downward looking meek and brainwashed women are the same. One has only to turn on the television of the latest protests in Lebanon to see the women of Hizbullah, all swathed in black, their necks and cheeks bulging out because of the tightness of their 'hijabs' which cover every inch of their body. Islam practices child marriage and young girls are raped across the Islamic world when they are sold into marriage by their families.

American leftists have an easy time hating people they call 'Christian', in this case the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Europeans have an easy time as well. The Mirror in England described the case as "Horror of Texas Child Sex cult." The mirror goes on to explain "According to court documents, girls born into the cult were married to much older men as soon as they reached puberty. And boys were groomed to perpetuate the cycle…The startled women and girls were all dressed in ankle-length pioneer dresses, their long hair identically braided …They knew nothing of the world beyond the locked iron gates of the compound…There was no access to televisions, newspapers or magazines…Neither the children nor their mothers knew how to use crayons given to them by social workers after they were rescued…They were physically sick after their first meal on the outside because their stomachs couldn't handle processed food or rich sauces..The pioneer-style dresses, worn over long handstitched underwear all year round are part of the cult's strict dress code. The women spent their days tilling the fields and quilting and are thought to have stood by as the men preyed on the younger girls."

Helen Pfluger noted that "They are like aliens - or we are like aliens to them…It was like talking to people from 1870."

Lets recount. This 'cult' is disturbing not merely because the girls are married at a young age. It is disturbing because of the full length clothing and the fact that women work in the field and sow and that there is a 'strict dress code' and they can't eat processed food and they don't watch TV or read newspapers or leave the compound. They are living in the 1870s. But Islam is living in the 8th century. Islam has a 'strict dress code'. Muslim women are forced to practice 'purdah' veiling and are expected to remain inside the family home as much as possible. In Egypt is it said of a woman that she should leave the house only three times: to marry, when her parents die and when she is laid in the grave. Yet as has been exposed previously, the west loves Islam. Islam is exotic. Its clothing is 'modest'. It is romantic. Western women enjoy donning the headscarf in the name of women. Liberal leftist women will gladly cover their bodies in order to meet 'conservative' and 'traditional' Muslim men so as not to 'offend Muslim sensibilities'. But the liberal will not don 'pioneer' dress when meeting with members of the Fundamentalist Church of LDS. They won't wear a bonnet when visiting the Texas 'compound'.

Why? Why is one 'strict dress code' in Islamic societies called romantic but a similar 'strict dress code' in Texas is called a 'cult'. What of Texas Muslims. Why are they not rounded up for marrying girls at a young age and keeping women in the house and forcing women to wear full length burkas? Why aren’t they written up in newspapers with lurid accounts of how they 'live in the 1870s' and 'are like aliens'?Islam is a cult. It is more of a cult and a more dangerous cult than the one in Texas because it has 1.4 billion members. It is more dangerous because it preaches worldwide Jihad and murder in the name of its 'religion'. It controls 30 countries. Imagine if the Fundamentalist Church of the LDS controlled dozens of countries. Would the leftists suddenly find it exotic? Would it suddenly be respected? Would we suddenly be afraid of 'offending' its sensibilities? The next time someone tries to trick you into thinking Islam is different than the Texas cult just pretend every 'Mohammed' is Warren Jeffs (the 'prophet' of the Texas Cult) and every one of those 'traditional' and 'modest' Muslim women is wearing pioneer dress. Only by understanding Islam this way can we understand its threat and the dreadful societies it has created.